Corruption indices which place countries like the UK and Luxembourg near the virtuous top while Uzbekistan and South Sudan are at the bottom are misleading. It is the financial and legal systems of the UK and Luxembourg that help the kleptocrats of Uzbekistan and South Sudan steal from their people.

Those who call for the legalisation and normalisation of what they call ‘sex work’ fail to understand the fundamental problem with prostitution. It is not work like any other kind. It is an exploitative institution that harms the women engaged in it and more generally hinders the building of gender equality.

Brexit is potentially a triple existential challenge for Ireland: for the peace process, for UK-Ireland relations and for our EU membership. This combination of factors might help explain why the other EU governments have not ‘thrown Ireland under a bus’ despite all the noise at Westminster.

In April 1986, reactor No 4 at Chernobyl in north Ukraine exploded, spewing radioactive flames and gases high into the air. An estimated dispersal of 50 million curies of radiation was later revised upward to 200 million, equivalent to releases from four bombs like the one dropped on Hiroshima.

Data-gathering and metrics have come to rule modern medicine, with the results of the former often being sold on to the ‘medical-industrial complex’. Meanwhile real doctoring, like life, is messy and uncertain. And surely humans are about something more than their value as data and a desire to live as long as possible?

The catastrophic fall from a golden age when reporters valiantly pursued truth to the web’s current indifference to falsehood is a favourite journalistic trope. But the moral decline goes back a long time, to when newspapers first embraced ‘lifestyle’, abetting the transformation of citizens into consumers.

For all Brazil’s great size and demographic weight, and the economic and social progress marked up since the return of democracy in the 1980s, the country continues to be the champion of social inequality and is still struggling to construct true republican values and true citizens.

Oscar Wilde saw one significant drawback to socialism – ‘too many meetings’. But with increasing inequality and ample evidence of big money’s erosion of democracy, citizens who wish to save it may well have to resign themselves to going out the occasional night.

In a situation where housing has been ‘commodified’ and has become more an investment good than a form of shelter or a human right, unless the state takes on a strong management role the prospect of owning one’s own home will soon for many people be just a distant dream.

The aim of any left-wing project worth its name surely has to be human emancipation. Perhaps the real strength of Corbynism might turn out to be its ability to incubate a new radical political culture rather than discovering a new form of economics.